NYC Photos - Botanical Gardens Greenhouses

This will be my last blog post featuring photos taken on my recent (early April) NYC vacation. I've posted so many already - skyscrapers, other buildings, street views, urban flowers, Central Park views, and lots and lots of pictures from the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx - that you're probably sick of all these posts. :) But for me, they're a nice chance to share part of my vacation with the world, as well as make sure I have a back up of my favorite photos, so that just in case something were to happen to my computer, my external hard drive, and my cloud backup of all my thousands upon thousands of vacation and flower photos, I also have this blog to house some of my photos too.

We were very fortunate when visiting the Botanical Gardens to get a sort of backstage tour, courtesy of my husband's cousin Eric, who is a horticulturalist there. He took us around the grounds in a golf cart, pointing out some of his favorite places and introducing us to his coworkers and students - and also took us into the staff-only greenhouses to show us what flowers they have growing/are keeping in storage there. Just like art museums have more to their collection than what is shown to the general public, so too does the NY Botanical Gardens have more to their plant "collection" behind closed doors.

Here are some of my favorite photos of some of the plants we saw on our whirlwind trip through the staff greenhouses with Eric (and some photos from the staging areas, where staff were getting ready to add plants to various gardens or planters around the grounds):

"Ability Bouquet (Stronger Together)" - In Progress 7

This drawing uses flowers to symbolize the wide variety of different physical, emotional, and mental abilities humans might have, as a way to show how we are better and stronger together when we are willing to help each other out.

To read about "the ability umbrella" - what exactly I mean when I talk about differences in ability - please visit this blog post.

To read about the symbolism of each flower used in this bouquet drawing, visit this blog post.

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It's time to (finally!) finish up the last of the bouquets in this "Stronger Together" series. Here are the photos of completing the last six flowers in this "Ability Bouquet" drawing.

These marigolds were drawn in with red, orange, yellow, white, light tan, light yellow-green, green, and black colored pencils.

Next, I worked on these daffodils, which I finished up with white, red, orange, yellow, light yellow, light green, green, and black pencils.

At the bottom of this bouquet is a large branch of white lilac flowers. I used purple, green, dark green, light yellow, yellow-green, light tan, and white pencils to complete these flowers.

These pink orchids - drying up and browning - were colored in with purple, magenta, pink, brown, white, yellow, yellow-green, and green shades.

Several large chamomile flowers went in next to the white lilac on the bottom. I used black, yellow, yellow-orange, orange, blue, light blue, and white colored pencils to work on these petals and centers.

I also started adding detail to the glass vase at this point, drawing in a few stems in green and marking reflections in the glass with white, green, and other colors.

Finally, I finished up with these dandelions. I used orange, yellow, and white for the flowers, and three shades of green for the leaves and stems. Small detail work I refined with a black colored pencil.

And that's it - my last "Stronger Together" drawing is finally done! I'll post some more images of the final drawing (and all of the drawings in this six-piece series) in the next two blog posts.

"28 Years" - Year #3

For general information about this 22"x30" colored pencil drawing, see this blog post.
For more information about the flower symbolism I used (Years 1-14) and life events that led me to select those particular flowers, see this blog post.

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My third floral arrangement (symbolizing the third year of my life, the year that I was two years old), is made up of aster and white lilac.

• Aster: symbol of patience, elegance, daintiness, protection (through the eyes of God), and wistful hindsight (a desire that things had happened differently)
• White Lilac: symbol of the joy of youth, youthful confidence, purity, and innocence

I drew the two flowers in graphite pencils to sketch out the composition. Then I started drawing in the stems with green colored pencils.

Here are the botanical illustrations I looked at in creating this composition (I do not own these two images; I found them on Google):

I colored in the leaves of the aster (the greenery on the left side) as well as the leaves of the white lilac (in the right side), using slightly different colored pencils to differentiate the two.

Then I started filling in the big pink aster flower.

I lightly sketched in the white lilac blooms, then erased the extra graphite pencil lines. Then I filled the white lilac in with (you guessed it) white pencil. Other colors were added on top of the white (blue, pink, yellow) to show shadows and different petals. Even something that is called "white" is not 100% white if you look closely.

And now Year #3 is also complete! Here is the whole drawing so far, 3/28ths of the way done: